Nicor National provides home warranty solutions and energy management plans through its call center, which consists of 250 representatives. Barbara Porter, vice president, business development and customer service at the Naperville, Ill., company, describes how she and her team restructured customer service operations to engage employees, provide better service to customers and improve general business functions.

Developing a Unified
Desktop ToolTo deal with these issues, we developed a unified desktop tool, Agent
Desktop. The proof-of-concept phase for this tool verified
that we were on the right track with our plans. What’s more, customer
satisfaction surveys supported our decision to
pursue a single front-end system.

·
It improved by 16 percent when the hold time for
a call was shorter than expected.

·
It increased by 8.7 percent when the customer’s
issue was resolved in one call.

·
Customer satisfaction rose by 20.4 percent when
customers had to provide their information only once.

·
It increased by17.5 percent when the customer’s
call was not transferred.

We knew the risks involved if we did not design and
implement a new front-end system that would allow our representatives to create
the drivers of customer engagement with each interaction. After exploring the
feasibility of building a system in-house, we decided to use a third-party
vendor to provide a customized CRM solution. We evaluated three potential
partners and chose Sword Ciboodle, a global company that designs customer interaction software for call centers.

Among the reasons for choosing Sword
Ciboodle were the company’s expertise in the contact center industry; its
promise to demonstrate tangible business value in a short period of time; and
its plan to work with us as extended members of our team. Together, we
developed a multiyear project consisting of two phases: first consolidating our
legacy systems and then consolidating our back-end systems, such as billing.

During
the first phase, the project team—which consisted of Ciboodle consultants and
members of the Nicor National call center, marketing, operations and IT/IS
teams—worked on identifying and creating efficient processes that would lead to
increased user productivity. We especially wanted to minimize our
representatives’ dependence on our claims management and sales management
systems, Oracle platform, and eSuperScript (ESS) system
in order to increase user adaptation and acceptance of the new system.